Yes, I'm in Africa

Sometimes I almost find myself forgetting that I'm on the opposite side of the world, but then there are times where it is impossible to ignore the fact that I am in Africa.

This morning I came back into my room after eating breakfast, and there was a huge cow grazing right outside my window! It was a little surprising. I could have reached out and touched it, had I felt so inclined, but I chose to take a picture instead. (Okay, maybe I would not have been able to touch it, I exaggerate, but it was pretty darn close.)

Even though I worked in a coffee shop for over a year, I will admit that I never really knew where coffee beans came from. It wasn't until near the end of my time at "Just-a-Cuppa," that I even found out that coffee grew on trees. But I had no idea what the trees looked like until I came here. This past Saturday I got to help pick some coffee beans behind the Ochana's house. They have a whole plantation, and the trees are all around 10-12ft tall. We had to use stepladders to reach the berries. The coffee beans that we see in North America hardly even resemble the ones off the tree. Picked fresh, they look somewhat like cranberries, and then if you open them up, there are two little beige beans inside which will eventually get dried, roasted, and then ground up to make people happy in the morning. I tried eating the outside shell part, and it's very sweet. It doesn't taste remotely like coffee, which suits me fine.

Another thing to remind me that I'm not in Canada anymore, (Toto), is the way that my hamstrings are sore from learning how to do laundry the Kenyan way! My new friend Sarah at Mercy Home taught me how to be a human washing machine. To avoid back problems, women here don't squat beside the buckets of water to wash their clothes; they bend at the waist so that their legs and backs are both kept straight. It's incredible how efficient they are. I told Sarah that if women in Canada would just start washing their laundry by hand, they could save a heck of a lot of money on unsuccessful dieting attempts.